What I Read in 2014 First Quarter

I began writing What I Read in 2014 literally at the beginning of 2014, making it as I go, adding each book when I finished it while the story was still fresh in my mind. What I didn't expect, however, was it to become large enough that I had to split it into separate posts.

Expect a ping-pong equivalent of my writing styles as I go. These are approximate times of when I read them, especially from July on, as I was reading about 5-6 books at once.

January

Miss Peregrine's Home of Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

Way better than I was expecting. I was a bit put off that it had been labeled Grade School Reader where I bought it from, but if this is what grade schoolers are reading....yeesh. To sum up it's basically X-Men children from the 1940's trapped in a time loop.

The Maze Runner by James Dashner

This one I was really looking forward to. Here's a rundown of my thoughts while reading it.

"Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh Boy!"

"This book is awesome!"

"This book is still awesome!"

"This book is...taking a while."

"...For being called Maze Runner, it sure is taking him a long time to actually run though the maze."

"This book is awesome again!"

"This book is...wow, 50% of the way through and I'm still waiting to see why the author titled it Maze Runner."

"Should have called it Variables, or The Final Glader, or something."

"Okay he's been in the maze three or four times. All the times he's been a maze runner he's just in training."

"Why didn't they do X, or Y, or Z? It took them two years to finally start screwing around and discovering stuff in the process?"

"85% of the way through, been (mostly) awesome the whole time, but I really don't think I'm liking where this is going suddenly for the Big Reveal."

"Oh god I'm getting Maximum Ride flashbacks."

"More flashbacks."

"Finished. I...I don't think I want to continue the series."

It's not that I didn't like the book, but I felt really let down considering the promises that the description and first half were giving me. Suddenly it turns into Maximum Ride at the end of the book, as I mentioned, but not in a good way. While it doesn't mirror the worst parts of Maximum Ride, it does mirror the most irritating parts for sure. I already feel like I know where the series is going from there, and I certainly don't want to follow.

Practical Mischief by D.D. Scott

(Only managed 10% of the book)

When I reached "coture, halter-style Armani Prive gown" I knew it was time to stop reading.

Stardust by Neil Gaiman

I watched the movie first, so I already had an idea of what it was going to be like. Somehow it was exactly how I expected, better than I expected, and worse than I expected all at the same time. Definitely for people who prefer really traditional fairy-tales. 

Feburary

Rot and Ruin by Jonathan Maberry

I had a different idea of what this book was going to be when I started

It was a bit of a rollercoaster of worry and excitement between "Oh crap this book is going to be boring!" and "Woo! Excitement!" (I'm simple about expressing what I enjoy.) I worried it was going to run out of plot 10-15% of the way through, but then threw a curveball at me that set the real story up. After that things really got going. No spoilers, but something happened that almost ruined my hope for the book, but came right back in a way that I forgave it (and happens to have a Checkhov's Gun I totally missed!) Overall I liked it, and would consider getting the next book in the series. I'm not exactly clamoring to get the next one, but I would certainly snatch it right up, given the right price.

For March

Starters by Lissa Price

I've been eyeballing this one for a while now and managed to pick up a used copy for cheap. I enjoyed it, but did find myself slow down halfway through as it's fairly generic in terms of YA teen dystopia. Still, I liked it enough to consider getting the sequel, especially since it's just a duet so I know the story would be dragged all over the place in an attempt to milk the series for all it's work. Given a choice between the next Rot and Ruin and the second book of Starters, I would choose Starters.

Hounded (and Hexed) by Kevin Hearne

The Kindle book was crazy expensive (they actually had to reduce the price when they realized it was more expensive than even the mass market paperback!) so I had to keep from squealing with delight when it was on sale for $0.99 during St. Patrick's Day. This one I had a lot of expectations for because, along with the Nightside and Mercy Thompson, series, I was pre-read comparing it with The Dresden Files (which meant I had a lot of high expectations of it)

Luckily I was quite happy with what I got. So happy, in fact, that I even broke my $3 Kindle Rule and bought the second one, Hexed, for $6

It's not Dresden Files, by far, but a review I read described it as "Butcher Lite" and it's quite spot-on in that aspect. There's quite a variety of magics and characters. Along with our Celtic druid main character we have: Russian and Polish witches, Indian body-snatcher, Jewish Kabbalist, as well as a handful of gods and goddesses of various locations (including the Native American trickster god, Coyote.)

One last fun little bit I hadn't even expected was that the series is chock full of massive, archaic words. Not only do I look them up, I also challenge my dad recognize them (with one exception, he's known them all)

My Book List for 2015

So I didn't get around to a bunch of books in my 2014 list but keeping track of nearly every book I read this year (a whopping 36ish books) gives me better insight as to how much I'll read this year. It also gave me a pretty good idea of what's been sitting around for awhile. So expect some repeats from last year with lots of new ones!

Girl in the Arena by Lise Haines
Delirium by Lauren Oliver
Enders by Lissa Price
Cinder by Marissa Meyer
Strange Angels & Betrayals by Lili St. Crow/Lilith Saintcrow
Lure of the Dead &
Slither &
I Am Alice &
Fury of the Seventh Son by Joseph Delaney (which finishes off the Last Apprentice series for me.)
Liberator by Richard Harland
The Eleventh Plague by Jeff Hirsch
The Last Olympian by Rick Riordan
The Royal Ranger by John Flanagan
The Alchemyst by Michael Scott
False Covenant &
Lost Covenant by Ari Marmell (With book 4, Covenant's End, coming up I'll hopefully read past the cliffhanger to a more satisfying end.)
Through the Ever Night &
Into the Still Blue by Veronica Rossi

Shifting Shadows by Patricia Briggs

Of course, I'm leaving lots of wiggle room for anything else that will pop up in the middle of this year!

No More Posts Until 2015!

Hey everyone! (meaning the three people who read this blog) No post today or December 30th, but expect plenty next year.

Of course, you can always check out my Twitter in the meantime!

Bring on NaNoEdMo!

Most writers are familiar with National Novel Writing Month. I say "most" because a writing friend of mine hadn't, but he's Canadian and I'm pretty sure I've worked around a Canadian long enough to get away with the phrase "Those wacky Canadians!" In a nutshell the rules are that you write a novel in the span of a month. Depending on the total word count you want to achieve depends on the number of words you have to type each day. Frankly I think Novella Month would be more achievable, but people have made some pretty good books under such time constraints.

I don't need that though, you know what I need? National Novel Editing Month.

Yes, I manage to procrastinate editing by more writing. I've written an entire manuscript to procrastinate editing the previous one, and you know what happened? I finished it. Now I have two written manuscripts in which neither have been edited.

Editing goes faster though, since the words are already down. You make a few tweaks here and there, maybe add a whole new scene, but it flies right by compared to writing from scratch. Right now The Crystal Witch clocks in at just over 38,000 words, a novella. Luckily the ebook market is more flexible about shorter stories. So, even if I edited a dismal 1,000 words a night (which is the goal I have each night when writing) I would still have it finished in a little more than a month.

More importantly though, Dusted came out all the way back in June 2012, and I don't want to pass the three year mark without publishing something else. What motivated me the most were two things, two authors really.

The first was Kristen Britain, she wrote a book called Green Rider, I already talked about it here, but the focus is how long it took her to write more books in the series. It wasn't that she was busy with other books like some authors, but it must have been some combination of a busy schedule and wanting to perfect it before release. Still, I dutifully read books 1-3, bought book 4 and have never read it (nor, do I think, I will), and now book 5 is out and I'm not even bothering. It took too long for the author between books, and it has taken her literally decades to get to things that were being foreshadowed in the first few books. Yes, you can always go back and reread books, but there are always new authors and stories coming along with promises delivered faster.

Second, and more relevant, is S.D. Tower. Who in the heck is S.D. Tower? This is an author who wrote a halfway decent book ("halfway decent" meaning I read it back in 2003) called The Assassins of Tamurin and then never wrote anything again. A "one hit wonder" except remove "hit"....and "wonder" too I guess.

Point is, I don't want to be like the first author, but I really don't want to be like the second.

So those are my motivations to edit. It won't be pretty and it won't be perfect, and I can't make any promises that I'll have something before the end of 2014, but I'll be working on it.

Let Me Get Sappy For a Moment

For me the holidays have never really meant a lot. Yeah, as a kid it's all the same "OMG stuff!" reaction but, as people get older, they tend to be a bit more family-oriented toward this time of year.


This makes my second winter since moving out of my parents place and, as of September, a full year of living on my own ("On my own" includes parents paying for bills, folding my laundry, washing my dishes, changing a flat tire, and cooking my dinner. Yep, good to be on my own...)

For me "family" doesn't really mean a lot. Whenever extended family visited (or we visited them) I'd be tortured by cousins as they broke my toys (I has toys that lasted 5+ years that only took 30 minutes to break in the hands of a cousin). I have always managed to interact better with adults than kids my own age and I'm glad I finally am one. Heck, I can't wait until I'm 30 so adults won't lump me into the "Stupid Young Adults" category.

You kids wif yer got dern laptops and infinity scarves!

Throw in the usual family drama llama sessions and figure the point I'm trying to make is that Thanksgiving and Christmas have always been a "Why?" thing for me. Had I known it was even a thing, I would have sequestered myself in my bedroom and listened to music with headphones on whenever the family thing happened.

When I got older my family stopped celebrating Christmas. It wasn't that we hated it, or were all bah hum buggery about it. We simply didn't bother. A tree was a pain in the butt to set up and maintain, wrapping paper is annoying, and we already get what we want the other 364 days of the year. Christmas is to me as what Labor Day is to you (except you don't have to hide for 2 months leading up to Labor Day.)

Except this year, it's like my heart melted. Suddenly I want a Christmas tree, something I haven't had in nearly ten years, and I want to put presents under it, and I want to get something special for my parents that says "I know you" and "I love you", and I want to go to their house and spend all day with them and have a huge dinner. We would load the wheelbarrow (or sled, depending on the snow level) full of wood, and I would pet all the cats who miss me (meaning everyone except Sandy), and we would do chores, and it would be lots of fun and as I go to sleep I have the warm fuzzies that only comes from being super duper happy.

Even if I don't accomplish all of that, it does give me an understanding of what real Christmas is.


...But no matter what happens, I will never tolerate Christmas music.

Classes That Should Be Taught at BYU-I

DRV101 - Driving on Icy Roads

DRV 110 - U-Turns are Illegal

DRV 120 - Your Brights Blind Other Drivers, Turn Them Off


EMO101 You're a Grown Up Now

EMO102 Seriously You're A Legal Adult

EMO103 Stop Acting Like a Child

EMO105-A Coping with Anxiety

EMO105-B Coping with Depression

EMO110 Moving Here Won't Solve Your Emotional Problems

EMO120 Helicopter Parents

EMO125 Being an Old Maid at Twenty Years Old


HLTH101 Nobody Cares That Your Mom/Aunt/Roomate is a Nurse

HLTH02 It's Just a Cold

HLTH105 If You're Vomiting It's Not the Flu

HLTH110-A Constipation - Help I Can't Poop

HLTH110-B Diarrhea - Help I Can't Stop Pooping

That Time I was Flash Robbed

Otherwise known as my first Trunk or Treat.

I know we're well past at this point, but if Christmas can sucker-punch me on October 28 then I can punch right back.

Plus, now that it's past October, have you considered adopting a black cat?

So the day started for me actually on October 30th. I worked 12 hour night shift starting at 6PM and had to switch to dayshift as fast as possible (I keep night shift hours even on my time off) so the fastest way possible was to stay awake long after I would have normally gone to bed. I got off at 6 AM, went home, waited for my brother to get up, helped him into his costume (which takes an extra person and 20-30 minutes to put it on), put on mine, and was right back to where I had worked only two hours earlier.

Now, I haven't done anything with Halloween since I was about eight years old. After that we would just buy our own candy and have a Simpsons marathon consisting of VHS tapes we'd recorded episodes on years ago. So it was actually a lot of fun to see people letting their inner child have free reign. There were people dressed up Mario Kart style, including 3 balloons and scooters. Green army men. Enough pirates to form an actual crew and enough witches (self included) for a coven. After getting my fill I headed home, 21 solid hours of being awake under my belt, and took a long nap while playing the "Just one more hour" game for 4-5 hours until my brother got home from work.

It was like having kids except  I actually got sleep.

From there we went to out friendly neighborhood trunk or treat.

Initially it felt like a flash rob, the participants becoming increasingly wild as the sugar in their system hit critical saturation. There were plenty of Elsas this year, and the one girl going as Cinderella was probably mistaken for an Elsa too, but there were a lot of cool ones too. A couple of my favorites were a tiny little Anna with a crochet hat made to look like her hair (complete with white streak) who's name was actually Anna, a Luigi with a ghost vacuum, and a kid in a stack of boxes I had mentally nicknamed Awesome-O.

If you're still young enough to go trick or treating yet watch this cartoon, your parents don't love you.

Now here's where I probably turn into an old coot.

I'm already awake trunk or treats defeat the whole point of the thing and that it has basically broken down into a fast-grab of candy, but what I wasn't expecting was the picky nature of the kids. I had one walk right up, take a good long look at the bowl, and proclaim "nah." And, by the end of the event, our bowl had actually gained different candies. That's right: the children were dumping lesser candies on us.

All I could think was "What the heck?" Back in my day (there's the old coot thing again), when we had to actually walk further than 6 feet for our candy, we appreciated every last bit we got.

I still enjoyed it though. It's been so long since I actually saw children dressed up in costumes that I guess I forgot the whole event of Halloween even existed on that level.



And, on a totally unrelated note do you have any idea how expensive razors are these days?